John Rogers

John Rogers, (born c. 1500, Aston, Staffordshire, England—died February 4, 1555, Smithfield, London), religious Reformer and the first Protestant martyr of the English queen Mary I’s reign. He was the editor of the English Bible published (1537) under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew.

A graduate of the University of Cambridge (1526), he was made rector of Holy Trinity, Queenhithe, London, about 1532 and two years later became a chaplain to English merchants at Antwerp. There the English scholar William Tyndale influenced him to forsake Roman Catholicism for Protestantism. After Tyndale was betrayed and executed in 1536, Rogers combined Tyndale’s translation of the Old Testament, which was complete through 2 Chronicles, with the remaining books from the translation by another English scholar, Miles Coverdale, and added Tyndale’s New Testament (1526). This version of the complete Bible, which also included Coverdale’s translation of the Apocrypha, was first printed in Antwerp in 1537 by one Thomas Matthew; this pseudonym probably was intended to protect Rogers from meeting Tyndale’s fate, and the Rogers edition was shortly afterward sold in England. Although Rogers had little to do with the actual translation, he supplied notes and valuable prefaces that constitute the first English commentary on the Bible. His work formed the basis of the Great Bible (1539), from which the Bishops’ Bible (1568) and the Authorized, or King James, Version (1611) came.

Rogers returned to England in 1548 from Germany, where he had served a Protestant congregation in Wittenberg, and published a translation of the German Reformer Philipp Melanchthon’sConsiderations of the Augsburg Interim. Appointed a prebendary of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1551, Rogers was soon made a divinity lecturer. On the accession in 1553 of the Roman Catholic queen, Mary I, he preached an anti-Catholic sermon warning against “pestilent Popery, idolatry, and superstition” and was immediately placed under house arrest. In January 1554 the bishop of London sent him to Newgate, where he was imprisoned for a year. With 10 other prisoners he was brought before a council in Southwark in January 1555 for examination, and within a week he was sentenced to death by burning for heresy.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen, Corrections Manager.